(no subject)
Dec. 17th, 2003 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbJoan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," about falling in love with New York in her twenties and falling back out by her thirties, has a line about "those of us who came from places... where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions," and I know exactly what she means because I came to New York in my twenties from a place where all those streets were just ideas, and I'd add Broadway to the list, because it means "Theater" the way those others mean, per Didion, "'Money' and 'High Fashion' and 'The Hucksters.'"
It wasn't just the abstractions, but the bewildering fact that all these fictional settings from movies and books were real. I read The Cricket in Times Square before I had any other idea what Times Square was, and I read about hiding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and later I saw the United Nations in North by Northwest and Central Park in Annie Hall. And there are so many other pieces of New York that I don't even remember where I first saw them but it wasn't in real life, that's for sure.
One day in midtown I walked by one of those weird urban developments where they've taken the idea of a shopping mall and tried to cram it into the bottom of an office building, and I saw a plaque on the building and it said Empire State something, and I thought, how sad, they've named this shopping center to give it a cheap psychological association with the Empire State Building. but aren't they infringing on a trademark? but no, Empire State can't be trademarked, it's the state motto, pretty clever how they got away with that and that's about when I realized OH. It's THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.
This is part of why I love Los Angeles, too: Because I cruise past Grauman's Chinese Theater, and Hollywood and Vine, and Hollywood, and Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard and Warner Brothers and Mulholland Drive and Ventura Highway in the sunshine, and it's not like being in a place, it's like being in a song or a movie or a book I read, but it's real, too, and there are people walking from shop to shop or photographing famous footprints or making a left turn from the right lane, and the combination of all these imaginary memories with this humming reality makes my brain buzz.
It's not about fiction, but something similar happens when I drive around Silicon Valley. I first noticed it when I was driving around lost and passed by Yahoo on the other side of the street. Yahoo? It had been a web site, an idea of a web site, for years and it had never occurred to me that there was any physical representation of it.
And later I drove past Excite every day on my commute to work, and I walked by Google on my way to a movie, and I watched Netscape gradually crumble into AOL and Verisign, and just this afternoon on my way from the post office to the library I noticed PayPal for the first time. PayPal! Seeing web sites made real isn't exciting the way my first walk through Grand Central Station was, or following the signs to the Griffith Observatory, but it still has something of that feeling, like I'm seeing multiple layers of reality superimposed on each other.
Are there other places that work like this for other people?
It wasn't just the abstractions, but the bewildering fact that all these fictional settings from movies and books were real. I read The Cricket in Times Square before I had any other idea what Times Square was, and I read about hiding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and later I saw the United Nations in North by Northwest and Central Park in Annie Hall. And there are so many other pieces of New York that I don't even remember where I first saw them but it wasn't in real life, that's for sure.
One day in midtown I walked by one of those weird urban developments where they've taken the idea of a shopping mall and tried to cram it into the bottom of an office building, and I saw a plaque on the building and it said Empire State something, and I thought, how sad, they've named this shopping center to give it a cheap psychological association with the Empire State Building. but aren't they infringing on a trademark? but no, Empire State can't be trademarked, it's the state motto, pretty clever how they got away with that and that's about when I realized OH. It's THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.
This is part of why I love Los Angeles, too: Because I cruise past Grauman's Chinese Theater, and Hollywood and Vine, and Hollywood, and Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard and Warner Brothers and Mulholland Drive and Ventura Highway in the sunshine, and it's not like being in a place, it's like being in a song or a movie or a book I read, but it's real, too, and there are people walking from shop to shop or photographing famous footprints or making a left turn from the right lane, and the combination of all these imaginary memories with this humming reality makes my brain buzz.
It's not about fiction, but something similar happens when I drive around Silicon Valley. I first noticed it when I was driving around lost and passed by Yahoo on the other side of the street. Yahoo? It had been a web site, an idea of a web site, for years and it had never occurred to me that there was any physical representation of it.
And later I drove past Excite every day on my commute to work, and I walked by Google on my way to a movie, and I watched Netscape gradually crumble into AOL and Verisign, and just this afternoon on my way from the post office to the library I noticed PayPal for the first time. PayPal! Seeing web sites made real isn't exciting the way my first walk through Grand Central Station was, or following the signs to the Griffith Observatory, but it still has something of that feeling, like I'm seeing multiple layers of reality superimposed on each other.
Are there other places that work like this for other people?
